I'd really like to be able to answer the questions:
* How many core Fedora contributors are there?
* How many casual but long-term committed contributors?
* How about the long tail?
* How does this break down by various project areas?
with data.
I have the hypothesis that Fedora follows the "90-9-1" rule, with a
very active core, a larger engaged group that isn't as visible as
individuals but which collectively contributes a lot, and then a lot of
casually interested contributors who chime in occasionally. Is this
true? Do the numbers come down to close to 90-9-1, or something else?
Has it changed over time (opened up, or become more restrictive)?
Then, building on the stats Bee (and Pingou) put together following the
election.... another hypothesis: the average voter turnout of about 200
is an approximation of the highly-engaged group (at least where the
engineering side of the distro is concerned). Can you support or
disprove this with data? (From fedmsg, mailing lists, or anywhere?)
I also think that the same probably applies to Ambassadors and that
election, possibly with little overlap of the FESCo set.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader

All,
Travel for the European tour begins today. I will be making my way back to
Raleigh (eventually) from being snowed in in NYC's from the #Snowzilla
storm (finally.)
1/27: Flight to RDU
1/28-1/29: Flights into BRU
1/30-1/31: FOSDEM (Distro Dev Room Moderator, all day)
2/1-2/2: Config Management Camp in Ghent
2/4: Fly to Vienna/Brno bus
2/5-2/7: DevConf.cz
1/8-1/10: Brno Red Hat offices/meetings
1/11-1/12: PTO
1/13-1/14: Return Flights to RDU
1/15: Final prep for internal metrics meeting
1/16: Deliver internal metrics presentation
1/17: Begin "business as usual again"
I will be on the telegram, and I have a Google Fi phone, so in theory I
won't experience service disruption if folks need to get ahold of me. This
is my first trip to Europe, so wish me luck on my travels. I can't wait to
catch up with (and meet for the first time) some of you folks :)
Looking Forward,
--RemyD.
--
Remy DeCausemaker
Fedora Community Lead & Council
<decause(a)redhat.com>
https://whatcanidoforfedora.org

Hi all,
Below is a recently published article on the Community Blog about women
in computing and Fedora's history and current activities involving outreach.
I think is something that should definitely be shared to all Fedora
social media pages. I'm not sure on what the policy on Red Hat social
media is, but I could also see this being something great to put out on
one of the other Red Hat accounts too.
Feel free to share this around too, I think this is a great summary of
the work being done in Fedora to improve diversity and increase
outreach. Thanks all!
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [Fedora Women] Women in Computing and Fedora - CommBlog article
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2016 19:21:10 +0530
From: Bhagyashree Uday <bhagyashree.iitg(a)gmail.com>
To: women(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
Hello all,
jflory7 and I have recently published an article about Women in
Computing and Fedora on Community Blog. Do take a look at it :
https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/women-in-computing-and-fedora/
It talks about :
*Diversity efforts in Fedora
*Anisha Narang's Grace Hopper experience
*Women's involvement in Fedora
*New opportunities for women like Outreachy
*Snippet of an interview with Fedora Diversity Adviser, Maria "tatica"
Leandro detailing her inputs on the current diversity situation in
Fedora as well as her goals and vision as Diversity Adviser.(A full
interview is scheduled for later)
*Call for Action - How can you help ?
Looking forward to knowing your inputs,
Bee

Hello all,
A new ticket is added to our Trac as of tonight about one of our
founding goals in CommOps -- helping create on-boarding badge series for
all of the different active sub-projects (and SIGs) of Fedora to help
make it easier for newcomers to get involved.
https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-commops/ticket/34
This ticket is laid out in a way that should help make it clear about
how to go forward. Ideas, comments, discussion are all welcome! I'd like
to bring this ticket up at our next meeting.
Thanks!
--
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
jflory7(a)gmail.com

I couldn't sleep so I wrote up some ideas that have been churning in my
head. I've discussed some of this with Remy but figure it'd be even
better to talk about it in public. :)
I think our mailing list history is a rich source for community
participation metrics, and I'd like to have some analysis beyond just
raw post counts, which don't really tell us much. Here's what I'm
thinking, in rough form....
I think we'd cover: fedora-council-discuss (including previous
incarnations), devel, test, server, cloud, workstation, marketing,
design, commops, docs, trans, (and others?); but not lists specific to
an individual program lists (e.g. anaconda). I'm not sure about
specific SIGs other than those associated with Fedora editions; the
information would be valuable to have but probably separately.
Likewise, the same info would be useful for the users list, but also
probably separately. (In any case, it'd be nice to be able to drill
down and separate things by list.)
We'd filter out known bots and automated posts. Possibly also ticket
traffic, but I'm actually kind of thinking that that's useful for some
places like FESCo where that's the _majority_ of the conversation.
So, then... collect and graph:
Users by Month
--------------
Probably adequate to consider "user" to be an e-mail address. Could
make a database of known multiple alias users -- like me at @mattdm.org
previously and @fedoraproject.org now.
1. Measure new posters each month -- indentifiers never before seen.
Possibly have threshold of at least three posts, to filter out "drive
throughs".
1a. Graph is simply new-users-per-month over time.
1b. Additional line on that graph: of those new users, how many also post
at least once ever again in a different month? (But count in month in
which they first posted.)
1c. Additional line: of those new users, how many also post in at least six
separate months after? (Same.)
Rationale: This will identify if there are times when we gain more new
contributors, and trends in contributor growth. Obviously 1b and 1c are only
valid in retrospect.
2. Categorize users into
2a. "New": only posted this month
2b. "Onboarding": also active sometime in prior six months but not before
2c. "Active": active in _all_ prior six months
2d. "Old School": active previously but _not_ in every one of previous six
months.
Graph those four lines by month as percentage of posts that month.
Rationale: another view on new users, but focuses on longevity rather than
growth and looks back rather than forward.
3. Categorize users by number of posts that month into percentile buckets:
"Prolific", "Involved", "Average", "Low", "Single Post".
Graph per month percentage of posts by each percentile bucket. Could also do
a visualization combining with #2.
Rationale: How much are the lists dominated by very active individuals?
Threads
-------
Probably adequate to consider subject line as thread identifier; could also
use actual reply-to headers.
4. For each month, categorize threads into buckets:
4a. Single posts
4b. Short threads: under 5 replies
4c. Normal threads: under 20 replies
4d. Megathreads! 20 or more replies.
Graph that count per month as percentage of posts which fall in each
category.
Rationale: Single posts with no replies (assuming we've filtered out
automated reports) are discouraging. Megathreads can indicate community
passion and big issues, but can also be indicative of communication
problems.
5. Further breakdown of megathreads into
5a. Megathreads with a majority of posts by two participants
5b. Megathreads with a majority of posts by fewer than five (or some other
small threshold) participants
5c. Megathreads with more participants than that
This could be simply an addition to the graph from #4 rather than
charted separately.
It might also be interesting (but much more work) to separate out
threads which start with a high number of participants but devolve to
5a over time.
Rationale: 5a is usually unhealthy.
6. For each month where a megathread exists, "color" based on percentage of
megathread participants in each category from #2 (and maybe #3 as well).
Rationale: helps identify character of megathreads.
7. It might be nice to run sentiment analysis across all posts each month. I
don't know much about this field, though.
Also
----
These same concepts would be useful for similar charts for other fedmsg
activity. For example: package maintenance, bodhi karma, etc. In fact,
it might be useful to have aggregate charts for different areas of
activity; for example, one for QA for charts 1 through 3 which
calculated values for posts, values for bodhi karma activity, and test
participation, and then just lumped them together into one "QA
activity" score (without even worrying about mapping user ids to match
between categories).
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader

Hello all,
If you haven't heard already, the CommOps team is helping assist
different sub-projects in Fedora write individual "Year in Review"
articles for the Community Blog.
https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/tag/year-in-review-2015/
Marketing is included in this, and thanks to the 2015 Retrospective and
mailga, we will have our own YiR published this week.
Later on, though, the plan is to have a larger "Fedora 2015 Year in
Review" article. I was thinking a great image to have for this would be
the Flock 2015 group photo from the Strong Museum of Play. I was
wondering if anyone knew where that picture was and/or who may have a
copy? I think it would be a great representation of some of the Fedora
contributor community and would make for a nice featured image for this
overall YiR article.
Thanks!
--
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
jflory7(a)gmail.com

On 12/17/2015 04:42 PM, Joe Brockmeier wrote:
> On 12/17/2015 02:53 PM, Justin W. Flory wrote:
>>
>> I see. How often were meetings happening in the past? From my
>> perspective, I think maybe the frequency as well as the organizational
>> pre-meeting plans could be adjusted. I know for the CommOps group, we
>> have a very rough outline of "things to cover" in the meetings in a wiki
>> outline. Additionally, having ticket-oriented meetings also seems to
>> have had decent success with the Design Team. Perhaps we could try to
>> incorporate tickets as a central part of our meetings?
>
> Tickets wouldn't hurt. It's been a while so I don't recall how much we
> were using Trac at the time, but it couldn't hurt.
>
> It seems to me it was weekly for a while, then bi-weekly. Again, it's
> been a long while (2013, early 2014 maybe?) and a new flock of Fedorans
> to help kickstart.
With what you and Ruth said, it seems like it might be a good idea to
space meetings on a monthly basis, and maybe increase frequency in the
month / two months before the release?
I think the next step might be to put a potential meeting date and
timeslot on the map for 2016.
--
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
jflory7(a)gmail.com